'Rain, A Tribute to the Beatles' opens Nov. 3 at Mahalia Jackson Theater

When Mark Lewis’ mother called him into the room to watch the Ed Sullivan Show one night in 1964, he had no idea he was about to see a history-making moment, one that eventually would shape his life.

"Rain, A Tribute to the Beatles," pays tribute to one of the most successful bands in history.

“Usually, when she’d say, ‘Come watch this,’ it would be for somebody like Liberace,” he says.

Instead, he saw the Beatles’ first performance on the show, and he fell in love with their music. He was not quite 13, an accomplished piano player, and already into rock and roll.

“But the Beatles were so different,” he says. “I bought their LP, and I played it and played it and played it.”

Lewis, who grew up in Los Angeles, never got to see the Beatles perform live.

“I was too young to drive when they were at the Hollywood Bowl,” he says. “I regret to this day I didn’t see them there. It would have been something to treasure.”

What he did, though, was create the long-running “Rain, A Tribute to the Beatles,” a multi-media live concert that opens Wednesday at the Mahalia Jackson Theater as part of the Broadway Across America series. It features more than 30 of the Fab Four’s greatest hits, including “Yesterday,” “Hey Jude,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Come Together.”

“The last 90 minutes of the show is mostly songs they never performed live,” Lewis says. “It’s a lot of their best material.”

The Beatles took the country by storm -- including a wild sold-out performance at City Park in New Orleans on Sept. 16, 1964 -- but their touring days lasted only three years.

“What they wanted to do was get into the studio and record,” Lewis says.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were actually together for a shorter time than “Rain” has been playing around the country. By 1970, the British group was splitting up.

Lewis, 59, didn’t plan to spend much of his life traveling around, paying homage to the Beatles.

“It just sort of happened,” he says.

The show had its beginnings in southern California in the mid-1970s, when Lewis was part of a band called “Reign.”

“Our goal was to play our original stuff and put out our own records,” he says.

The band members liked playing Beatles music, too, and the set they added to their shows became popular. At a club where they performed, they talked the owner into doing a Beatles tribute on a slow night.

“We expected to play for 20 or 30 friends, but 300 or 400 people showed up,” Lewis says.

They started doing more Beatles tributes, and one night an agent came and saw them.

“The next thing you knew, we were doing this Beatles thing,” he says.

Sometime during that early period, the band changed its name to “Rain” because Reign had been misspelled so often, and “Rain” was also the title of a Lennon-McCartney song.

When some of the original members moved on to other things. Lewis stayed with the Beatles tributes.

“I teamed up with some guys who had done ‘Beatlemania.’ We added costuming and sets, and it just took off,” he says.

After Dick Clark saw Rain perform, he hired the band to do the soundtrack for his movie “The Birth of the Beatles. That got the band even more publicity, and it got more people interested in hiring Rain.

“The show started to evolve,” he says. “I found the best singers, the best performers, and here we are, in beautiful Broadway venues all over the world.”

“Rain” follows the Beatles from their first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show to their Sgt. Pepper days and on to the Abbey Road album. All of the music is live, but it’s interspersed with historical footage and what is described in a press release as “hilarious television commercials from the 1960s.”

“I don’t want to tell you what they are because I like people to be surprised,” Lewis says.

As founder of the show, Lewis worked out all the musical parts for the songs the Beatles never performed live, and he played keyboards for much of the two decades the show has been around. Now, he’s the full-time manager.

“I’m on the outside looking in, and I’m very happy with it,” he says. “It’s a different perspective.”

When Lewis and his wife, Debbie, aren’t traveling with the show, they live in Reno, Nevada. This week, they’re in New York for the show’s opening on Broadway, and next week, they’ll be in New Orleans to watch “Rain” take theater-goers back more than four decades to “some of the greatest music ever written or recorded.”

The show focuses on the music rather than the turbulence on the ‘60s.

“It takes you back to that entire era in a positive sense,” Lewis says. “You come out of the show with a smile on your face. It’s just a lot of fun.”

“Rain, A Tribute to the Beatles” will have eight performances at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts from Nov. 3 through Nov. 7. Tickets start at $25 and are available at the Mahalia Jackson box office, at Ticketmaster locations and at the Ticketmaster Website. Group discounts for 15 or more are available by calling 504.287.0372.

Sheila Stroup's column appears in Living Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831.